Pastel 4

For Valentine’s Day, I read four different takes on romance. Or at least, that’s what I’d like you to believe. It just so happened that Pastel, Kashimashi, and even Immortal Rain are rather heavy on the love. I also reread the first volume of From Eroica With Love to ensure that my Valentine’s Day was as lovetacular as possible. Because… the love was then from Eroica, you see… yeah. That volume is not nearly as good as the rest in the series, but there’s still a lot more flirting in that one than there has been in recent volumes. I’ve already talked about it though, so no entry for it.

It worked out, because each of the four is a representative of different genres… Pastel for shounen romance, Immortal Rain for shoujo, Kashimashi for girl’s love, and Eroica for boy’s love… though Eroica is by no means boy’s love, Dorian can’t help but spread guy-on-guy action wherever he goes. I swear I just grabbed random stuff off the shelves.

Anyway, Pastel! This series just isn’t for me. It doesn’t do anything particularly offensive this time around… there was only one situational joke which made me cringe, and everything else seemed fine. I just can’t warm up to it for some reason, though.

I think this may have something to do with Yuu, who I get the impression does indeed return Mugi’s feelings. She’s just a robot though, who doesn’t show any emotion except a kind of stuck-up displeasure. She can’t help it she can’t show affection. Her facade is melting away at least a little bit in this volume though, as one of the major plot points was that a girl at school befriended her to ruin her reputation and steal Mugi away. She at least expressed displeasure that was not aimed at Mugi this time. I just don’t like Yuu very much, despite trying as hard as I can.

I still really like Mugi though. He makes for a really good main character. I wanted to start listing off qualities that made him better than other similar people, but the only other two characters that sprang to mind were Yota from Video Girl Ai and Ichitaka from I”s, and not only are those two the same person, they’re also the same person as Mugi, except Mugi’s a bit nicer and a little less of a screw-up. Maybe less agressive too, which I like. Perhaps that’s just a personal preference, though.

There were some situations with Mugi’s old girlfriend which made it clear she still liked Mugi, which is kind of a bummer because that means she’ll be back a lot. The better part of the volume comes in the second half, where a good-looking girl decides to target Mugi to play with, and when he resists all her advances, goes for Yuu, as I mentioned, to ruin her reputation and try to steal Mugi away for the fun. This goes about as you would expect it to, with the only real character development coming from Yuu, who as I said expressed slightly more emotion than usual, but not really that much more.

I’ve got one more volume of this I’ll probably read this week. I don’t know… it’s not really bad at this point, but it’s also not doing anything particularly good right now, either. I’m having the same problem with I”s too, so I think this genre of shounen romance just isn’t really for me.